


Letter Written in Darkness, the rewrite

by Anna_Hopkins



Series: Letter Written in Darkness [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Dark, Dark Harry Potter, Gen, Mentor Voldemort, Not Canon Compliant - Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Parselmagic, Parselscript, Parseltongue, Sane Tom Riddle, Sane Voldemort, Self-Discovery, Slow To Update
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-02
Updated: 2019-01-01
Packaged: 2019-02-09 18:31:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 19,874
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12894198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anna_Hopkins/pseuds/Anna_Hopkins
Summary: "In the days after the battle at the Ministry, Harry takes unexpected action --  action that just might change everything."Rewritten.





	1. The White Letter, or, A Desperate Hope

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Letter Written in Darkness](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9180394) by [Anna_Hopkins](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anna_Hopkins/pseuds/Anna_Hopkins). 



> Hello all. It's been quite some time since I updated LWID, largely because I decided to rewrite it and waited until I had something decent before I posted anything.
> 
> This was originally a "pleasure piece", something I had written just for myself; it indulged a lot of the fluff I'd wanted to write, at least in the portions I never posted. But as these things tend to do, it developed a plot of its own that I would be remiss in keeping on my laptop. As such, please enjoy...
> 
> (comments welcome.)

_…He had the strangest feeling that there was someone standing_  
_right behind the veil on the other side of the archway._  
_Gripping his wand very tightly, he edged around the dais,_  
_but there was nobody there. All that could be seen_  
_was the other side of the tattered black veil._

_“Harry, let’s go, okay?” said Hermione more forcefully._

_“Okay,” he said, but he did not move. He had just heard something._  
_There were faint whispering, murmuring noises coming from the other side of the veil._  
_“Can’t anyone else hear it?” Harry demanded, for the whispering and murmuring was_  
_becoming louder; without really meaning to put it there, he found his foot was on the dais._

_…And Harry saw the look of mingled fear and surprise_  
_on his godfather’s wasted, once-handsome face_  
_as he fell through the ancient doorway and disappeared behind the veil,_  
_which fluttered for a moment as though in a high wind and then fell back into place._

_… “There’s nothing you can do, Harry…nothing…He’s gone.”_

**Part** **One.**

Even in June, Hogwarts Castle could be cold at night, somehow. After waking up from the same nightmare for the third time in as many hours, Harry caught the chill on his sweaty skin and gave up on sleep for the night; he slipped out of bed to shower instead. He fully expected to pace aimlessly until the sun came up, as he’d done the previous two nights. These nightmares were hardly a new experience for him – the content (Sirius, the Veil) was a more recent addition.

He made his way in the dark from the bedroom to the bathroom, fumbling with the tap to turn the shower on, and only then remembered he could have lit his wand the whole time. _I always think of the obvious after the fact, don’t I,_ he thought bitterly. _That’s what makes me so easy to predict, to control._ Harry muttered to himself while the shower ran, train of thought continuing along the same vein until it arrived at the subject of the Headmaster and his manipulations – a topic that he hated as much as he had hated the Dark Lord Voldemort until very recently.

Lately, he found he hated Dumbledore the most. Restrained anger coursed through the black-haired wizard as he thought of his place on the chessboard; now that was a grudge worth keeping around.

When he checked the time after his shower, it proved to be just after midnight; so Harry stuffed his valuables into his schoolbag, few as those valuables were, and dressed for a long walk under the Cloak, simmering with the unresolved emotion that was, more than a little, directed at himself, as well.

The bottom edge of his Cloak rippled with an unseen breeze as Harry left Gryffindor Tower to roam the castle and the grounds. He let his feet take him where they would, while he brooded endlessly over recent events. When he looked up, he was standing at the door to the room where, if he remembered correctly, he’d seen the Mirror of Erised in first year. _I bet Sirius is in the reflection now,_ Harry seethed. For a moment, he paused in his anger to wonder if he even saw the same thing in the Mirror that he had five years ago. _I’ll never know, will I?_ He walked on, up and up the stairs until he was in the seventh-floor corridor, approaching the wall where the Room of Requirement stood idle. An idea had come to him a moment ago, and now he wanted to test it.

_I want the room where the Mirror of Erised is,_ he chanted in his head, pacing back and forth. If this worked, he would have his answer. He paced three times and looked up to see a door had appeared after all. It opened silently onto a pitch-dark room, and Harry was glad for the darkness for the moment; he closed the door behind him and felt it disappear.

Slowly, like a sunrise, a dim light began to fill the room – Harry realized with surprise that it was a much larger room than he’d thought. The ceiling, far overhead, reminded him of an old cathedral he’d once seen in a dream (was it a dream, or a vision? He couldn’t tell). In the center of the room, the Mirror stood; there was no other furniture. Harry approached it with caution, reading the inscription on the gold frame and seeing it hadn’t changed. “Only what I most desire, eh,” he murmured, and closed his eyes to step in front of it.

Once upon a time, when Harry had been but a child compared to now, he had looked into the Mirror of Erised and seen his entire family there, supporting him – and been overwhelmed by the love he’d seen in the glass. But now…He pressed a hand up to the cool glass, blinking in surprise at the scene that unfolded before him.

The edges of the glass were blurred by a black mist that shifted and swirled like river fog. A cemetery he didn’t recognize filled the background, old gravestones in uneven rows under the silhouettes of gnarled trees. In the center of it, he, or someone that looked like him, stood in black billowing robes, only recognizable by the scar on his forehead. He held a strange wand in his hand, and wore several rings on the other, but the eyes…the eyes were red.

Harry recoiled from the image in shock, and turned from the mirror, not intending to look back. Was that really his heart’s desire? All he could think of was that the man in the mirror looked _powerful._ “Only power, and those too weak to seek it,” he muttered, considering the quote in a different light.

Around him, the Room shifted, turning into a private study with a fireplace and a window that looked over the grounds toward the Lake. The moon was beginning its descent, but Harry knew his night was only beginning. What if there really _was_ no good or evil? Power looked like the only way he would ever escape that stupid prophecy, would ever get to leave the game that Dumbledore and the Dark Lord were playing. Blue torches flared into life on the walls, as he continued to pace circles into the floor of the study. Harry noticed his earlier anger had settled into a cold, calculating calm.

He considered his options: he could play along, or try to get out from under the old wizard’s thumb. How? _How?_ If he failed, he would have gotten nowhere and changed nothing. If he succeeded, he’d have a new level of freedom beyond anything he’d had before, and that honestly seemed worth the risk.

Then it was like a switch had been flipped. Suddenly Harry knew _exactly_ what he wanted to do. He whirled in place to stare at the writing desk that stood against the wall: pristine stacks of parchment in various colours and a wall-height shelf of different inks waited for him. The Room was always a step ahead of his conscious thoughts, Harry mused, feeling the ghost of a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. He seized a few leaves of crisp white parchment, a metal-tipped quill, and a well of deep red ink, and puzzled together how to phrase what he now knew he wanted to write.

A curious feeling stirred in his gut, gentle as the fabric of the Veil, and his hand twitched, writing illegible curves and lines into the paper as if of its own volition. Harry realized they were _letters_ , and that this was Parseltongue – in written form.

“Perfect,” he grinned, and set to pen the letter he knew would be his first step out of the chains of thrice-damned destiny, and from the formless figures that reached out from the shadows of his nightmares lately. If this was wrong, it was oh-so _right_ , and if it was unexpected, that was exactly what he needed it to be.

He wrote a letter to the Dark Lord, and mailed it off.

 

 

Peter Pettigrew flinched awake at the insistent rap of a tawny owl at his window in Gloucester. An envelope addressed to him was tied to the bird’s foot; inside was a second envelope with no addressee, and a piece of red parchment that read, in a sharp script,

_Pay the debt you owe me. Bring this to the Dark Lord._

He shuddered, feeling the compulsion of the life-debt come to life – Wormtail had never expected Harry Potter to call upon him in this way. He Apparated to the edge of the warded property that was Riddle Manor, on the outskirts of Little Hangleton, and shivered as the Dark Mark on his arm heated up when he stepped through to the other side. It was a long walk up to the dilapidated manor, the path interrupted frequently by overgrown weeds and fallen tree limbs; in a way, it reminded him of Muggle haunted houses, the kind he had seen in children’s books in the houses they’d raided. A fearsome aura filled the air the closer he got to the front door, like the walls would grow teeth and try to eat him (and considering the wards, they might be if he were an invader). Wormtail wrung his hands and hesitated to use the doorknocker, but eventually the compulsion won over, and he stuttered, “M-my Lord, a l-letter arrived,” praying that he would get away with requesting an audience so suddenly.

The door opened just enough to let him inside, then slammed shut behind him. He made his way down to the study, where the Dark Lord met with his rare visitors, and paused outside the door to wait to be called in. Eventually, the door audibly unlocked, and a voice hissed, “ _Enter.”_ He stepped through the threshold and bowed as low as he could, holding the letter out in front of him.

“What is this,” said Voldemort in a tone that threatened pain if he answered wrong. Pettigrew shuddered, answering as best he could, “A letter for my Lord arrived a few minutes ago. This humble servant, most insignificant, was compelled to bring it immediately, by a life debt.”

A low hiss from somewhere above him – Pettigrew had not been given leave to look up, but he thought it was probably Nagini – echoed through the room; he flinched at the detection charms that were suddenly cast at the letter he was holding, but didn’t dare drop the envelope until his Lord was done. “A life debt,” Voldemort spat, “from whom, Wormtail, does this letter come?”

“H-Harry P-Potter, my Lord –“ he was interrupted by the silent Cruciatus and Silencing Charm that the Dark Lord cast on him for a moment, and bit his tongue while writhing in soundless pain. At some point the envelope had been Summoned out of his hands, he realized, and when the curses were lifted, Wormtail knelt properly on the floor, waiting to be given leave to speak further. Instead, Voldemort said, “Get out of my sight,” and Banished him through the doorway out into the hall. Wormtail stumbled out of the manor and collapsed in his room in Gloucestershire, shaking from the aftereffects.

 

When the sniveling oaf of a Death Eater had left his sight, Lord Voldemort opened the envelope to find a most interesting letter inside. Nagini flicked the parchment with her tongue and reeled back in mild surprise, even before he’d read the message.

_May this reach the Heir of Slytherin;  
I mean no harm._

The H at the bottom looked like a twisted serpent’s tongue. And Parselscript…

“ _The scent of the boy-foe is strong on this letter,_ ” Nagini murmured, nosing the parchment. “ _It appears to be…legitimate._ ” She scented the paper again, remarking on the mix of emotions that lay within the boy’s scent: anger, exhaustion, grief, and a hint of a complex scent that the Dark Lord called ‘determination’. “ _How do you plan to respond?_ ”

 

Harry had wondered how long it would be before his letter reached the Dark Lord – or if it had been simply cast into the flames. The life-debt would at least get it to wherever Riddle was hiding, he knew. Several hours after dawn, as he picked wearily at his breakfast of eggs and toast, his peculiar correspondence continued: the owl that carried the Daily Prophet had a second parchment tied to its leg. Harry took the second paper as he paid the owl, and hid it in his sleeve without bringing attention to it; he would read the response in the Room of Requirement.

Excuses were made to Ron and Hermione, who didn’t seem to expect his presence anyway, as he donned the Cloak and fled up the stairs to the Room, this time stepping into a high-ceilinged study with a chaise lounge and a lamp on the side table. He opened the parchment, re-reading the message several times before he realized what it meant. Harry’s scar tingled painlessly when he brushed his fingers over the familiar handwriting, not much altered from the diary’s script from second year:

_May this reach the Boy-Who-Lived,  
from Number Three Chardrey Hill, Old Ammett, Essex._

The metallic shine of the ink, and subtle serpent-scale pattern on the writing itself, were plenty of proof as to the origins of this response even if his scar hadn’t sensed it. The message was a _return address_ , wasn’t it? Probably one that was specially warded, Harry supposed. He realized the message was in Parselscript, as well, which was probably how it had gotten through whatever filter was keeping his mail monitored for threats and hate mail (of which, he was sure, there had to be a lot), and considering Dumbledore, probably plenty of gifts that wouldn’t make their way into his vaults. Rereading the sincere response invigorated Harry, setting the right mood for him to properly compose the longer letter that he now felt he could safely send; he stood up, eyes closed, and let the Room shift to the study it had been earlier in the day, so he could lay out his response in dark green ink.

 

The Death Eater at Chardrey Hill returned more quickly than Voldemort had expected him to; midmorning brought a formal response, in the same white parchment as before. It rather bemused the Dark Lord to have correspondence with his prophesized foe, so out of the blue. Then again, considering the longer letter that he now held, perhaps the battle at the Ministry had changed something in the boy. Mere hours after that pointless duel in the Ministry Atrium, when the mental link between him and young Harry Potter had flared with emotional energy, he had glimpsed the destruction of Dumbledore’s office through the boy’s eyes and felt the pure hatred the young wizard felt for that thrice-damned old man.

Nagini nosed at the back of his hand. “ _Well? What do you think?_ ” He turned his attention back to the Parselscript message, reading it properly for the first time, and began to be more and more surprised with every line.

_May this reach the Heir of Slytherin – to whom, with fortune, this letter arrives._

_In the time since our brief meeting in public, I have recognized the falsehoods that fill my knowledge of past and present. Your opponent has lied to me for the very last time. I cannot bear to be his chesspiece – not as others do._

_The following, I know to be certain: S.T.S. is playing both sides, “and the Dark Lord will mark him as his equal, but he shall have power the Dark Lord knows not…and either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives…the one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord will be born as the seventh month dies…”_

_From 4 Privet Drive, Little Whinging, Surrey, with open arms._

The Dark Lord’s pale fingers shook slightly as he read the prophecy a second time. If that really was the rest of it – “ _There are no lies on this parchment,_ ” Nagini insisted – then the boy had given away his entire hand, hadn’t he? But the last line was different. _With open arms…_ it sounded like a _ward key_. Why would Potter give him this? What was that address supposed to mean?

Nagini nosed at a second, smaller page that had fallen to the floor when he’d opened the first. “ _This parchment smells of…desperation,_ ” she murmured, evidently confused. He floated the second parchment off the floor; in shaky handwriting rather unlike the formal letter that had preceded it, the note read,

_They are watching me, and the voices beyond the Veil speak my name from the shadows. Even death is freedom. Please tell me – am I going mad?_

“… _What_?”

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Minor formatting and grammatical corrections, 2018.12.30)


	2. Fulcrum, Part One

_Please tell me…am I going mad?_

 

Nagini recognized the symptoms of alarm in her master-companion, and coiled tightly about his shoulders, attempting to ease the rising tension in the room. He was silent for an hour, eyes closed, face an expression of much concern as he seemed to ponder the meaning of the second note. Eventually, in a still-shocked breath, he voiced his rambling thoughts: “…he would not believe he was sane, from what he is hearing. We must act quickly; this is much more immediate than the war…”

 

When noon arrived, and everyone in Gryffindor Tower had finished packing their trunks for the evening’s train trip, Harry cast a silencing charm around his bed and dumped the contents of the trunk onto it, picking through the broken quill bits and parchment scraps and dust. There were shards of glass mixed in that he initially didn’t recognize – then he bit his lip and resisted tearing up at the recognition of Sirius’ mirror. He didn’t want to think about it anymore, he _really_ didn’t, but he couldn’t bear to get rid of the mirror shards. He took a mostly-ripped-up shirt handed down from Dudley, tore it in half, and Summoned the mirror fragments into the large square of fabric that remained, wrapping them up tightly so he wouldn’t lose any. He piled his things back into the trunk haphazardly, not caring if they got wrinkled; he wouldn’t get to open it again till September either way, knowing the Dursleys. The rubbish from the bottom of his trunk could stay on the bed, for all he cared; Harry knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep until he was on the train anyway, with the stress getting to him like it was.

The knowledge that he’d keyed the Dark Lord into the wards – funny how easy it had been to find the keyphrase, once he looked for it – with a plea for help did calm Harry a little, insofar as he might hope for death or escape. He reminded himself of that fact, as he closed the trunk; just then, Hedwig alighted on the windowsill with an eagle owl beside her, the both of them hooting softly at him. The unfamiliar owl eyed Harry with a refined air, a stately patience, up until the letter was off its ankle, at which point it took off in an undignified flurry of wings. Hedwig seemed keenly interested in the parchment that Harry was holding, but stepped delicately into her cage when he opened the hatch. He stepped back behind the curtains of his four-poster to read the parchment, and raised his eyebrows at the short missive:

_Tonight, then._

And suddenly, a genuine smile found its way onto his face, with the stomach-fluttering elation he hadn’t felt in years. He _would_ be freed – tonight! Tonight! – and now all he had to do was _wait_ for it. He was distracted, but happy, for the train ride, buying a ton of candy off the trolley for everyone in the compartment, and even the Dursleys couldn’t ruin it completely, because he only had a few more hours before it would be over, one way or another. Inexplicably, Vernon made the decision to let him keep all his “freakishness” in his room, instead of the cupboard, which would soon make things much easier.

Harry managed a nap or two while the sun went down, not caring that he was hungry; though they had gotten quieter since he last slept, the voices still called him in his dreams.

 

At dusk, Privet Drive became the scene of a significant operation. Six Death Eaters – as many as Voldemort had time to Obliviate when all was said and done – were sent to monitor the wards between Potter’s arrival and the intended departure. They were told to watch the entire street, reporting any energy changes in the area (which could be detected despite the stringent wards placed on the house in question) so that while Voldemort alone held the key to the wards on Number Four, the two teams could still let him know if anything changed in the interim.

Their reports, near midnight, confirmed his expectation: no one besides the boy knew he had given the key away, which meant no one had added to the wards. Nagini insisted on joining him on this journey, and he felt no need to dispute the request. They Apparated under powerful Disillusionment to the next street over, flew silently into the back garden of Number Four, and waited, motionless, for the last lights to turn off and for the Death Eaters to disperse from the area per their orders.

Finally, it was time.

Nagini called for the Boy.

 

“ _Come outside._ ”

Harry started, realizing he’d been on the cusp of dreaming for at least an hour. The source of the voice that had called him was below, somewhere in the back yard, he thought; he couldn’t see anything from his window, but it had to have come from down there. Blindly, he groped around for Hedwig’s cage and let her fly free, whispering to her to find him later; by touch, he found the button on his trunk that shrank it, which helped immensely in the window escape he now needed to make. It was just his luck that the Lightening Charm on the trunk had remained in effect a little longer than expected.

He carefully pulled the bars out of the window, privately glad the Dursleys had never tried to reinforce them, and climbed out, securing a foothold on the small roof below the window before pulling the trunk out after him. He triple-checked that his wand hadn’t fallen off in the past few minutes, then turned to the task of getting down to the garden from the roof, which he had only tried twice before. It wasn’t a long way down, gladly. There was only a moment’s hesitation before he managed the fall.

Now was the defining moment. If he was about to die, it would be here. Harry turned to scan the garden for the Dark Lord he knew must be there, and at first saw nothing except shadows. A moment later, the formidable wizard faded into view, letting go of the Disillusionment, and Harry barely suppressed a gasp – they’d only been a few feet from each other – at the glow of the red eyes he could now see watching him. His reflection in the Mirror of Erised had the same eyes, he was sure of it.

He stepped forward to meet his fate – _“Bow to death, Harry,”_ _laughed a voice from a memory_ – under the moonlight. They stood at arm’s length from each other, and Nagini (eep) moved to cross the gap and link them bodily, before the pull of Apparition took them somewhere else entirely.

 

In passing, Harry noted that Apparition seemed a lot smoother than Floo or Portkey travel – _though that could be because it’s Voldemort doing it_. They emerged from the darkness of Apparition into a mossy clearing, surrounded on all sides by ancient trees. It was still midnight here, wherever they were; under the moon’s pale blue cast, every knot and gnarl in the wood seemed to take on the shape of something living, something watching, and Harry would have shuddered, if not for Nagini’s coils still tight about him.

The Dark Lord held up a hand, and the blue hue was overtaken by light red, illuminated from below. A distortion in the wall of wood before them manifested into a tall, wrought-iron gate, pushing the trees around it out of the way. It was different, yet alike, to the Diagon Alley entrance Harry knew; he remembered learning about these types of gates in Transfiguration, and how they led to “wizard space.” That was all he could think of before he was pulled forward by Nagini and through the gate.

And then, they were standing on the precipice of a high cliff overlooking a vast flattened moor. Warm winds whipped against Harry’s face, warmer than he would have expected from the predawn skies, and he looked down to see grass rippling in waves, far below. The landscape that spread out before him was unlike any he had ever seen before.

“We are free to speak now,” said Voldemort somewhere in the periphery. Nagini had let go of them both and slithered off somewhere, it seemed. “Shall we go down?” The older wizard held out a hand to Harry, who took it warily. He had expected it to feel strange to the touch, like snakeskin, bony or slimy or cold, perhaps – but it was just a hand, like any other, and Harry wondered how many other things he’d heard about the Dark Lord were lies.

They Apparated a second time – Harry marveled at how easy it was – and arrived at the base of the cliff. Not far ahead of them loomed a stately manor, perhaps three stories tall, stark against the ambient light of the sky. The Dark Lord started a leisurely pace toward the manor, and Harry made to follow behind him; but the older wizard surprised him once again by insisting they walk side-by-side. “In this place,” he said, and Harry found himself lingering on every word, “there are neither eavesdroppers nor spies; the theatrics we put on for the public are unneeded now.” Harry noticed his voice changing from high-pitched to a more human tone. “So I will regard you freely as my equal, which you are, and take off this costume of mine, much as it might now have become familiar.” A nimbus of yellow light glowed briefly about him, and in a blink the Dark Lord’s appearance had changed from the one Harry knew to a different appearance that, for all the younger wizard knew, might have been his original look.

It was a handsome face; that was obvious enough. It reminded Harry of the young Tom Riddle he’d met in second year, but grown up. Remembering the diary, he wondered at the magical power at the Dark Lord’s fingertips. This man looked at _him_ as an _equal_?

Harry’s disbelief must have shown on his face. Voldemort seemed amused as he went on, “Yes, an equal. Not because of a ‘prophecy’, though that might have been easier to believe – but because despite my public appearance, I am in fact quite sane, and I found your letter most intriguing.” He snapped his fingers, and the lights in the manor windows turned on, several paces ahead of them. “You called on _me_ , in desperation, when years of propaganda would have you do otherwise.” They paused before the front door; the older wizard took out his wand and drew a pattern on the door that probably had something to do with the wards.

“A will as strong as yours is rare, even among the most magically powerful of Wizarding history. It wasn’t luck that let you resist the Imperius. Each time we met in battle I noticed it more; that reason alone is enough to render you my equal, even if you didn’t have a core of the strongest type – which you do.” Harry glanced up at the Dark Lord, accidentally meeting the man’s eyes; before he looked away, something seemed to flicker, flamelike, in the Dark Lord’s red irises. “And then, you wrote to me of _voices_ , after you saw the Veil, and I _knew_. What was the name the voices called you? When they echoed, as if from the abyss?”

As if to drown out Harry’s response, the wind picked up and circled them at the doorstep, filling his ears with white noise. So Harry repeated it. In the back of his mind, he wondered how the Dark Lord had known of the nature of the echoes, when he had only written that brief note about them. When he spoke the name a second time, it lay almost tangible in the air about them, and a chill went down Harry’s spine.

“…Hadrian.”

 

Voldemort seemed pensive, for a moment. “Hadrian,” he mused, considering. “It is a curious name, to be certain. Marvolo was the name they gave me, when I was called.” _That answers the unspoken question,_ Harry supposed. Now the Dark Lord was looking at him with a curious expression on his face. “May I call you Hadrian, or would you prefer Harry?”

“Hadrian, please,” Harry said. A brief wave of lightheadedness passed over him as he acknowledged it as his name – something magically potent was involved there. _Am I ‘Harry Hadrian James Potter’ now?_

“Then, please call me Marvolo. It will make more sense in a moment.” He opened the door to the manor, and another, stronger wave of dizziness came over Harry like a gale wind. It was like the universe had shifted on its axis, a little. The glow of a fireplace at the far end of the darkened entrance hall beckoned him forward toward some better-lit room. Marvolo seemed pleased with himself when he stepped over the threshold, Harry behind him.

“Welcome, Hadrian, to the Manor-on-the-Moors.”

 

Shortly thereafter, they were sitting in armchairs in the center of a large study, the paneled walls sparsely decorated save for a few neat bookshelves. Tall curtained windows looked out over the moors, and while the hearth glowed with blue flame, and torches lit the room with the same colour, the light was soundless – Harry could hear the whispers of the wind against the windowpanes, and his gaze was drawn out toward the moon setting in the west. Strangely, he didn’t feel tired at all, though he knew he hadn’t slept in more than a day.

Marvolo – Harry found it easier to call him that, to reconcile his appearance with his status – had set a large bottle of what looked like Muggle liquor on the table between them, with two heavy glasses beside it. “All right,” said the man, rolling his shoulders and stifling a yawn, “I’d best start with the most important thing – the reason you heard the voices in the Veil, and the reason they call for you by that name. Sometime around the moment you first saw the Veil, a few days ago, you awakened an infamous magical trait that British wizards in particular fear like no other. It is, curiously, yet another thing we have in common.” He seemed to be steeling himself for the moment of exposition. “You, Hadrian, are a necromancer.”

 

_Necromancer._

Harry blinked.

In fact, he blinked several times, and reached, open-mouthed, for one of the heavy glasses Marvolo had filled with liquor, to take a sip of it. After a moment, he had regained enough control of himself to at least stop gaping like a fish; he almost asked if the man was _sure_ , as if that were a question. Instead, he asked something marginally less silly. “Does this mean resurrecting the dead _is_ possible?”

“Of course,” Marvolo answered, as if that question didn’t surprise him in the least. “It does require several living sacrifices, and strong focus, in order to conduct properly – it’s not a perfectly conserved system – but given enough practice in the arts, you could resurrect most anyone you wanted, if you knew how to call for them.”

Yet another paradigm shift, Harry supposed, numb as he was compared to the previous shock. Sirius _could_ come back. He almost laughed at how easy it sounded, how easily he could fix everything that had gone wrong this year. Sure, the idea of sacrificing other people for it wasn’t _desirable_ , but that concern was meaningless at the moment; he set that concern aside in favor of the growing enthusiasm he had at the idea of the…talent…that Marvolo had revealed to him. Harry took another sip of the liquor, which was definitely Muggle whiskey and not Firewhiskey, and found it calmed his nerves a bit.

A silence had developed between them in the past minute or so while Harry processed what he had learned. Fortunately, Marvolo didn’t seem to mind it. He continued, once Harry was able to pay attention. “With necromancers as few and far between as they are nowadays – hidden in wizard space, most of them, just like ourselves – the most immediate and effective opportunity to learn the arts is here, with me.” He sipped from his own glass, and stared into the alcohol for a moment, then looked back at Harry. “I realize this is a sudden change in perspective for both of us, but if you are willing to learn from me, on an informal basis of course, it would be my pleasure to teach you what I know.”

Harry wasted no time in nodding his agreement, temporarily unable to speak as he was. There was so much to gain, and so little to lose, that he didn’t doubt his decision in the least. Marvolo seemed pleased by this, as if he hadn’t completely expected the response he’d gotten. They toasted to the new arrangement, then sat in the parlor for about an hour more, till their glasses were empty and the sky was turning pink. Marvolo was the first to stand, slowly, as if he were equally tired as Harry had begun to feel; he showed the younger wizard upstairs to where the bedrooms were, and tired as Harry was, he picked the one nearest the stairs to stumble into and collapsed onto the bed in a heap, asleep before his head hit the pillow.

 

Elsewhere, Albus Dumbledore cast a weary glance over the table of witches and wizards that had assembled in their pyjamas at Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place. Several of them still nursed injuries from the battle in the Ministry not three days prior; the worst of the bunch were still in St. Mungo’s. Remus was passing out bottles of Sirius’ stash of Old Ogden’s Firewhiskey to anyone who wanted it, and quite a few took him up on that offer. Dumbledore himself took a bottle, though he would wait until he’d given them the bad news to open up a bottle of his own. Or, perhaps, two or three.

He adjusted his glasses, and stood to address the Order at large. Though he added words here and there, the long and short of the matter was that somehow, under their very noses, Harry Potter had disappeared sometime in the past eight hours with no disturbances in the wards. No magical traces were present to indicate an attack or kidnapping; Severus had no information to add from the Death Eater side of things, when asked; it seemed that the boy had simply up and disappeared, much as he had done the summer of his third year, but this time without activating the Trace.

Search parties were assembled, Firewhiskey was drunk, and eventually the Headmaster swept from the room in a shimmer of gaudy fabric and Flooed back to his office to try and scry for the boy again; with any luck, the previous attempt had failed on a fluke. But no – it failed again. And the third time he tried it, with more power behind the magic, was no better. This left three avenues for investigation, the old wizard surmised: Harry was either behind very specific wards, was wearing the Invisibility Cloak, or was hidden somewhere outside the range of the scrying spell – in which case, they might never see him again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Minor formatting and grammatical corrections, 2018.12.30)


	3. Fulcrum, Part Two

Harry opened his eyes from a deep and dreamless sleep that had managed to relax all his muscles, leaving him boneless on awakening. It took him a long moment to remember where he was, and how he’d gotten there, but when he did, he smiled. Today was the beginning of _his_ summer, _his_ new life. Of course he’d already be enjoying it.

At about this point he noticed the heavy weight on his chest: Nagini. She had all but coiled up in bed with him. “ _Good morning, hatchling,_ ” she hissed softly, in as singsong a voice as Parseltongue allowed. “ _Did you sleep well?_ ” Harry replied in the affirmative while he tried to sit up in bed, squirming under her; he found his limp body couldn’t compete with her sheer bulk, and flopped back against the mattress, giving up with a breathless laugh. Nagini made a ‘ki-ki-ki’ sound that had to be snake-laughter, didn’t it, and moved aside to let him out from under the sheets. He mused at the new evidence for her wit and cleverness – the Dark Lord’s serpent was much smarter than he’d given her credit for from glimpses in his visions.

He stood up eventually, stretching, and leaned against the bedpost while he looked around at the room: it was a rather large suite, with intricate molding where the wall met the ceiling, with a lot of open space – like the Gryffindor dorms, maybe, but with just one bed. One wall was all shelves, currently empty; a writing desk and chair were set against the adjacent wall; beside his bed, a sleek nightstand bore a silver platter that held a large bowl of water, its purpose yet unknown. The room had to be lit by magic, Harry decided, because he couldn’t for the life of him figure out where the pleasant yellow-orange glow was coming from.

The far wall, then, had what was probably the bathroom door, next to the currently-unlit fireplace. He stumbled toward it, feeling the call of nature, and shortly after, the need for a proper bath – which was how he found himself under Nagini’s serpent scrutiny while he stripped off his ratty secondhand clothes for what he intended to be the last time, tossing them directly into the fireplace with a fervor.

“ _You have many scars, hatchling,_ ” she murmured from the bed. Harry wasn’t sure what scars she was referring to in particular, but the train of thought led to a realization that _his_ scar hadn’t hurt in quite some time, and he hadn’t even noticed. Now that he had, he stopped to wonder: he hadn't felt this painless, this comfortable, this _at ease_ in his life.

The tub was _huge_ – like the Prefects’ bathroom from fourth year, maybe even larger. Harry even glanced up at the walls to make sure of the absence of a certain mermaid’s portrait. Had Marvolo designed the room after Hogwarts on purpose? If Harry remembered correctly, he _had_ been Head Boy; which meant he must have been a prefect, too. Anyway – _Focus, Harry, you probably stink_ – he turned his attention to the potions in various bright colours that lined the far edge of the tub on a neat stone shelf. Each was labelled with the contents and directions on how to use them, in the familiar script that he remembered from Marvolo’s letters. An especially large bottle, labelled “minor healing for surface injuries”, turned out to be the same bubble bath soap from the prefects’ bath that he had luxuriated in at the time; it quickly became Harry’s favourite of the set, though the multipurpose hair potion, which actually managed to tame his hair a bit, was a close second.

Harry emerged from the bathroom perhaps an hour later with a cloud of steam on his heels, toweling himself dry, to find his trunk sitting open by the bed, and Nagini nosing through it. She had apparently picked out his clothes for him: they lay, somewhat disheveled, on the bed. “ _The house-elves moved your trunk in while you bathed,_ ” she explained before he could ask. “ _Perhaps I should join you tomorrow, if you bathe for so long every time – Marvolo doesn’t much like to soak, and it’s nice to have something to look at while I swim._ ”

He blinked, taking a moment to puzzle that one out while he got dressed. Was he hearing it wrong, or had he just been flirted with by a snake?

 

The descent to the ground floor was slow going: Nagini had decided to wrap loosely about his shoulders, so he didn’t feel quite as light as he had a few minutes before. The view from the windows in the hall indicated it was in fact midafternoon: the sun beamed warmly past the heavy curtains. He eventually made it down to the kitchen, with her direction, and found it about as large as the one in Grimmauld Place, with the welcome addition of sunny windows. No house-elves were in sight – “ _Marvolo plans to introduce them to you later,_ ” Nagini explained – and Harry didn’t feel inclined to look for them so soon after Kreacher’s betrayal anyway, so he fixed himself a boiled egg, humming a tune he’d picked up from somewhere. As he sorted through cabinets looking for salt, he was keenly aware of Nagini eyeing the round morsel. “ _I can make an egg or two, for you,_ ” he offered, seeing how her eyes sparkled at the idea.

Which was how Marvolo found him in the kitchen an hour later peeling shells off of no less than two dozen boiled eggs, with Nagini watching over his shoulder. It was the first time Harry had heard the older wizard’s real laugh – he jumped in surprise, or would have if the serpent weren’t weighing him down. “I see you’ve become fast friends,” said Marvolo, wiping his eye. “Nagini is an old hand at coercion.”

They sat, or in Nagini’s case, coiled, at the kitchen table for a late lunch – boiled eggs and fresh fruits – before Marvolo led an informal tour of the house. The first stop was the library, which stunned Harry into silence at its very scale: it was larger than Hogwarts’ library by at least double. Wall-to-wall shelves in dark lacquered wood bore small nameplates that distinguished sections; at a glance, Harry spotted books on such varied topics as wandlore and Wizarding children’s tale, Egyptian runes and Greek statue symbolism – even some Muggle books had been included. The tomes themselves were in varying states of age and distress, many almost new.

Naturally, the largest section was the wall-and-a-half of shelves pertaining to the Dark Arts: one very long row was stocked with black books, all the same size, with silver numbers on the spines. “Those are my books of notes on the Dark Arts,” Marvolo explained, picking one up off the shelf. “While most Dark grimoires are written in Latin or Arabic, my notes, which draw from them, are all in Parselscript – which you can read as fluently as English, conveniently enough.” He levitated down a large tome with a green cover from the adjacent Magical Theory section. “I’ve always kept all my notes in that language, in part so that Nagini can read it, as I often have her assistance in my research.”

He set the books he’d picked up down on a nearby table and snapped his fingers; a pair of house-elves, taller than most elves Harry had met, popped in with a soft sound like a distant chime. “Speaking of assistance, these are Sigurd and Elath, the elves who maintain the Manor.” Harry wasn’t surprised, honestly, to see that the two elves were draped in black fabric, unlike the rags he’d seen on Dobby and Kreacher or the tea towels at Hogwarts. They bowed in Harry’s direction, introducing themselves in soft voices. “Guest Hadrian is much welcomed to the Manor-on-the-Moors.” Then they popped out of the room without a sound. Harry turned back to Marvolo, who was speaking again.

“Sigurd maintains the library and the storage rooms downstairs, in addition to the research laboratories when they aren’t in use. Elath handles the rest of the house and the grounds, though I tend to leave the moors to their own devices.” They left the library now, heading to the other end of the house, passing a glass wall beyond which lay several rooms full of bubbling cauldrons and various equipment Harry didn’t personally recognize. “These are the potions laboratories,” said Marvolo, pointing out several cauldrons and describing what was brewing in each. “I’ll show you around the rooms themselves in about a week, once the brewing processes are finished. Any changes in the ambient magic would likely ruin them – delicate potions can be like that.” Harry saw golden sparkles in the steam coming off one cauldron, and purple flames dancing around the rim of another.

A stairwell off to the side at the end of the corridor led down to the cellars, which felt more like the Hogwarts dungeons than any regular cellar he’d seen. The air was cooler down here than upstairs, and bore a familiar smell Harry couldn’t place. The overall atmosphere was nearly the same as that in Grimmauld Place, and when Marvolo showed him large stone chambers and storage rooms full of long boxes, Harry realized he’d forgotten he was in the company of _the Dark Lord, a legendary necromancer_. He admitted as much to Marvolo when the older wizard seemed to be wondering.

“Worry not,” Marvolo said in reply. He smirked – “you’ll be halfway to legendary by September.”

 

Dinner upstairs was much more substantial than lunch had been. “What would you like?” Marvolo asked. Frankly, Harry had no idea what to ask for – between Hogwarts buffets and scraps at Privet Drive, he had never really had the chance to order a specific dish. Marvolo gestured casually with his hand, and a moment later, two plates of shepherd’s pie appeared on the table. Harry found the taste to be exactly to his liking.

The older wizard took red wine with dinner, and insisted Harry have a glass by his plate even if he didn’t plan on drinking it; Elath poured out water for them as well. Nagini, who had gone off somewhere during the day, returned to the house once dinner had ended and followed them back into the library. She regaled them with stories of the forest animals, of several rabbits she had chased until the sun went down, and coiled around Marvolo’s armchair while he perused a scroll by the fireplace.

Harry brought his schoolbag down from his trunk, and considered starting his Charms summer assignment, before a more immediate question came to mind. “Marvolo,” he asked, “does the Manor have an owlery? Or do owls go somewhere else?”

The older wizard looked up from the scroll. “Ah, yes. You set your owl free last night, did you not? The moors are warded against owl post, so she should have arrived at the safe-house on Chardrey Hill.”

 _I can’t believe I forgot about Hedwig_ , Harry thought, feeling guilty. “So if anyone sends me letters, they’ll go there?”

“They should, yes.” Marvolo flicked his wand, conjuring a silver sphere in the air in front of him. He held up a finger to his lips, cutting off whatever Harry had been about to say, then spoke sharply into the sphere. “Rookwood.”

A hum like radio static emanated from the floating sphere, before a voice responded on the other end, somewhat muffled. “My Lord?”

“Check the owlery at Chardrey for a white owl. Report back whether it has arrived. Do nothing else.” Harry waited, holding his breath; he was surprised at how easily Marvolo’s voice could change. Was it a Transfiguration or an affected tone of voice? A minute or two passed in silence, the sphere crackling softly, before the Death Eater on the other end – Rookwood – returned.

“The owl is here, my lord.” Harry privately found the obedience rather refreshing. He sometimes wished his friends would listen to him that easily, not that he would admit it to them.

“Ensure no one disturbs the bird.” Marvolo cut off the connection in the middle of Rookwood’s ‘yes, my lord’ and let the sphere fade away. He turned back to Harry. “There you have it, then. Elath collects any relevant letters from the outside world directly, for privacy, and leaves them in my study; your correspondence should appear on your desk upstairs each morning and evening.”

With that settled, Harry returned to the puzzle of what to do for the evening: he leafed through the summer assignments, turning pages in the relevant schoolbooks with a listless air. Soon his eyelids began to feel heavy, and he returned the books to his bag, bidding Marvolo good night. Just before he fell asleep, his thoughts wandered to the Veil, and its fluttering fabric formed a background image for a long series of pleasant dreams.

 

When he heard the door close upstairs, Marvolo set down the scroll he’d been pretending to decipher, and considered the past two days’ observations of young Hadrian. The boy, he felt, was almost insubstantial – if he was trying to be unobtrusive, considerate of Marvolo’s lifestyle, he was successful in that, but it left the Dark Lord somewhat…concerned.

Trace of memories had reached him, in the years between his ‘death’ and his ‘resurrection’ – prior to the boy’s eleventh year, Marvolo had thought the lingering pain was only a side effect of being without a body, but that was simply not it. The brief glimpses he’d gotten of Hadrian’s life in the past five, six years, when his emotions boiled over, were always at Hogwarts; he knew surprisingly little about the boy’s home life, and had only been able to piece together Hadrian’s character through their recent interactions, especially those that took place in the Manor.

He’d thought, once, that Hadrian was similar to himself at that age: an orphan (of Marvolo’s own making, to be fair), unassuming on first glance, whose appearance hid a powerful magical core – this much was true; but if they were similar, then where was Hadrian’s inner curiosity, his driving ambition, his will to power? _That_ was what he was missing; _that_ was what worried him.

Nagini shifted on the armchair, sensing his unsettlement. “ _What’s wrong, Marvolo?_ ”

“ _I worry for the boy_ ,” he admitted, knowing Hadrian to be asleep upstairs. “ _He has the will to live, but not the will to power – at least, not that I have seen – and I worry about the small behaviours he expresses. What if that desire has been..._ taken _from him, by someone else?_ ”

She tilted her head, considering. “ _He_ is _rather subdued, isn’t he? I thought of it fondly, but the hatchling isn’t supposed to be a house pet. For someone of his magical strength to be so quiet…perhaps it has to do with the scars on his back?_ ”

“… _Scars?_ ” Marvolo hadn’t seen or heard of any such marks. “ _What do you mean?_ ” The unease he felt only grew when she related her observations of criss-crossed scars against his shoulders and back. That was not good, not good at all.

He hadn’t originally considered those Muggles relevant to Hadrian; now, the oversight was obvious. _Never underestimate the enemy._ Marvolo stood from the chair, Nagini coiling about his arms and shoulders, and Apparated out to the cliff-top, and from there, back to where Hadrian had lived. If what he was thinking was _true_ …he would start with the Muggles in his search for answers.

 

On his second morning at the manor, Harry discovered he was alone. Marvolo and Nagini had, according to Sigurd, gone out in the night without saying when they’d return. _They really trust me enough to leave me here alone?_ He related as much to the odd elf, who seemed somewhat perturbed at the question, but said nothing.

In their absence, the silence in the Manor pressed heavy against his ears; Harry found that even the sunlight seemed _off_ , somehow, different from how it had been the day before. Left to his own devices, he ate and bathed without luxuriating in it – his thoughts were elsewhere. He had the niggling feeling that he _should_ be doing something, but he honestly had no idea what. On his desk, two leaves of parchment bearing greetings to Ron and Hermione, respectively, remained incomplete; any desire he had to write to them had disappeared the instant he looked at their names. The outside world seemed so far away, when he was here. Why should he bother with it?

After lunch, he set foot in the library, peering from the doorway at the high shelves of books on every wall. Yesterday, while touring this room, he had felt drawn to a particular shelf, in the Dark Arts section, whose books were bound in a cream-colored leather. Now, he ran a finger down the spine of the first volume, puzzling over what could possibly lie within. The books smelled sweet, almost floral. Harry brought the book over to a large armchair that sat opposite from Marvolo’s desk, and opened it to the first page, scanning for a table of contents. The books did not have a title, but the first chapter seemed to be about the connections between the mind, the body, and the magical core. Leaning back in the armchair, he began to read.

 

“Someone’s been here _,_ ” hissed Remus Lupin urgently the moment they Apparated onto Privet Drive. “Someone was _just_ here _,_ ” he insisted, when Moody threw him a look. The old Auror stared through him (Remus had always found that uncomfortable) down the street, toward Number Four, expression unreadable, but with the smell of apprehension on him. “Wands out,” Alastor murmured, just before he renewed the Disillusionment and set off down the street in the controlled pace that Lupin recognized as an Auror’s run.

They paused at the gate to check the wards; the house itself didn’t look any different than its neighbours, but the ward structure was rapidly collapsing. They weren’t surprised – Albus had said it would happen, and Lupin knew, though Moody didn’t, that it meant Harry had found somewhere else he considered ‘home’. By dusk, there would be no traces of the wards remaining. Considering how easily the wizard that had been here had come and gone, they were already next to useless.

The werewolf shuddered imperceptibly as they neared the front door; the lingering sensation of _power_ having passed through the area burned in his nostrils like sulfur, fresh and potent. Moody cast several detection spells, but found no discernible magical signature – even with several high-level Auror spells. “Whoever this was, they’re well-disguised,” he spat. “Couldn’t be Hit-Wizards, they wouldn’t hold up to this…” He continued his muttering for a few minutes while Lupin roamed the yard, checking for anything they might have missed.

He found the stale remnants of Apparition, but the signature was probably equally disguised or erased. A few minutes later, Moody sent a significant look Lupin’s way – being mutually Disillusioned, they could see each other – and they made to enter the house through the front door: it was slightly ajar, as if the last person to close it hadn’t done so firmly enough, so Alastor nudged it open with the end of his shoe, scanning the room beyond for hidden traps and nodding when he found none.

An hour later, they returned to Order headquarters, bearing mixed news – all three Muggle occupants, Harry’s relatives, were safe, but they had been Legilimized by an unknown aggressor, one who had thoroughly wiped his signature and their memories of his presence. “The bastard was only gathering information, not doing damage,” Moody growled, taking a long drink from the flask at his hip. This seemed to worry Dumbledore more, not less – the old wizard adjusted his glasses with a trembling hand, looking back up at the assembled from the scrying bowl that had, once again, failed to show anything but an inky black that meant Harry couldn’t be found.

“I fear for the worst,” the Headmaster said softly. “Young Harry is likely held hostage, by Death Eaters or their sympathizers, as we speak. I can only imagine why the Dursley family’s minds were sifted through by an accomplished Legilimens – they may be trying to independently confirm whatever information he is coerced into giving them.” Several at the table recoiled in horror; others bore grim expressions, remembering similar events from the last war. “We must redouble our search,” Dumbledore continued. “Who knows what could be happening to him as we speak?”

 

_…the magical cores, of which there are three types: Light, Dark, and Grey, so named for the density of their magical saturation. Core types differ in how they gather and release energy – a Light core must gather, store, and release energy in separate steps, and does not quickly refill when drained. A Grey core is similar to a Light one, but refills more quickly. A Dark core, however, is always gathering and storing energy, even as it is being consumed, allowing for much faster recovery –_

Harry looked up from the book at the sound of the front door opening and closing – Marvolo was back. He took a green ribbon bookmark from the end table beside his chair and turned to greet the older wizard, but he was already at the doorway, studying Harry with a strange expression on his face that was almost like…pity? He strode across the room and seated himself in an armchair that faced Harry’s; Elath popped in to set a large platter of sandwiches, fruits and glasses of water on the coffee table. Before either of them spoke, Nagini climbed up onto Harry’s chair. “ _My poor hatchling,_ ” she crooned, “ _I would never have thought your early years so dreadful._ ”

“ _What do you mean?_ ” he asked, confused. _She wouldn’t know about the Dursleys – unless?_

Marvolo leaned forward in the armchair, propping his chin up on one hand and reaching for a sandwich with the other. “ _Nagini,_ ” he chastised, “ _at least let me be part of the conversation before you start. I want to hear Hadrian’s answers to your questions, too,_ ” he paused to take a bite of the sandwich, “ _at least once I have something to eat. Sandwich, Hadrian?_ ”

A few minutes passed in companionable silence, all three of them eating (Elath brought Nagini a mouse), and then Harry said “I was reading –“ at the same time Marvolo said “Nagini and I—“ and they both paused, waiting for the other to continue. Marvolo went first. “Nagini and I visited the house you lived at, to resolve a question about your background. If it’s any concern, the Muggles are perfectly unharmed, I assure you.”

“…My background?”

“You recall my saying a day or so ago, that we’re very similar in certain ways? And different in others?” Harry nodded, and Marvolo continued, between bites of sandwich, “This intrigued me for quite some time – that we have about the same amount of power at our disposal, and yet chose to live very different lives, at least so far. In my observations in your first year, limited as they were, I recognized your potential to excel; yet you seemed to lack the drive. I wondered _why_ that was. Time, Hadrian, flows much differently for a bodiless wraith, and I used my time in that state to collect my thoughts from the far-flung reaches of my scattered soul. Between the end of my time on Quirrel’s head, and the day of my resurrection, I tried to understand _you_ , my prophesied enemy, my equal, to a better extent than I had my enemies before. For a while, I was obsessed with the idea of us being two sides of the same coin, but that isn’t entirely the case, is it?”

Sigurd appeared in the lull in conversation to refill their glasses of water; Marvolo sipped at his, fixing Harry with an odd look, as though re-evaluating him. “And when you joined me here in the moors, you seemed almost too quiet, too unquestioning, for a guest; I couldn’t reconcile that with the Gryffindor traits I’d heard about from others, nor with my own observations from your first year. Last night, I shared my concerns with Nagini, who had a way of putting it that I thought was rather on-the-mark.”

Nagini shifted from her place on top of the armchair so that both Harry and Marvolo could see her clearly. “ _Like a great serpent, raised in a zoo, released into the wild – lacking the instincts to know what to do with freedom._ ”

Harry was about to disagree – that he’d had lots of freedom in Gryffindor – when he realized the full implication of her statement. He looked back at Marvolo, who was eyeing him with the type of concern he’d only previously seen on someone like Hermione when she worried over him.

“Last night, I went back to the house you’d been living in, and looked through the Muggles’ memories of you in their house.” Marvolo paused; he had the same almost pitying expression that he’d had earlier. Harry paled, realizing what the older wizard would have seen. “We _were_ alike, very much so, I saw – for about three years, until they forced you into slave labor. Any ideas you might have had about defending yourself were beaten out of you; after that, they were limited to thoughts of running away, at least before you got your Hogwarts letters.”

Images of Vernon’s sister, Marge, inflating like a balloon came unbidden to the forefront of Harry’s thoughts. “…you’re right,” he whispered.

Marvolo set down his glass on the table. “I’d have liked to be wrong,” he murmured sadly. “You may already know I was raised in an orphanage; I was an outsider in my early years, but never a slave. I desired knowledge and power more and more as I exerted what little influence I had on my peers; you were essentially forbidden from any of that. Where would the will to power come from, if not from within? Nowhere.”

Harry blinked, realizing his eyes were watering. Marvolo’s words were dredging up old memories he had forgotten – pains of a life he’d chosen to ignore once he’d gone to Hogwarts. “I…” he choked on the words, averting his eyes from the other wizard. “I _was_ better than those Muggles, wasn’t I?” He shuddered; the older wizard had cut him deep with his words. In any other situation, Harry might have refused to be pitied, but he couldn’t find the strength to maintain a confident façade. This was something he’d never brought up with his school friends, with anyone really. Snape had probably seen bits of the memories but disregarded them.

He swallowed, trying to steady his voice. “If I did anything to…to stand out, I was beaten. S-starved.” A hot tear trickled down the side of his face, and he did nothing to try and wipe at his eyes; his hands were balled into fists, shaking in his lap. “ _But I_ was _better than them,_ ” he hissed. Nagini rested her head on his shoulder in a gesture of comfort; he was shivering, upset. “ _They_ tortured _me when I showed it! If not for my magic, I…I would have_ died _!_ ”

 

Marvolo sat in silence, watching the younger wizard break down. He could feel the anguish in the air, coming off the boy in waves. Echoes of memories of pain projected off of him; Hadrian was sobbing quietly now, face in his hands. This was a much different kind of pain than the kind the Dark Lord knew. He glanced at the book that sat on a table beside Hadrian’s armchair – part of the series on magical theory of souls.

“I _hate_ them.” Hadrian looked up at him, and for a moment, his eyes flashed _red_. The temperature in the room was beginning to drop. _Oh,_ Marvolo thought, _I know what’s happening._ If he remembered right, there was no stopping or reversing the change that was taking place. He cast a quick spell to shield the books from the imminent magical explosion, and another to let him see the patterns of magic in the air. It was just in time.

(Elsewhere, a silver gadget in the Headmaster’s office slowed to a stop; he was not around to notice it at the moment.)

Hadrian’s magic lashed out in a wave like a thunderclap; the shockwave moved the chairs several inches across the floor, and goosebumps ran up Marvolo’s arms. He watched, riveted, as the boy’s soul began to change shape; when Hadrian had only been Harry, his soul had been constricted, confined, nearly as badly as if someone else had bound his power on purpose; but now, he was beginning to break that bond, to untwist, and it was fascinating to see. The flow of his magic, previously counter-clockwise, was beginning to _turn the other way_. Up become down; left became right; forward, backward; within, without. Marvolo had never seen such a total reversal of patterns – now, here he was, pinned to his seat by the very force of the change.

With a great shudder and a final burst of magic, Hadrian suddenly went very still, and slumped back in the chair, breathing harshly. His pupils were blown wide, and he stared, glassy-eyed, at the ceiling. Marvolo managed to rise from his chair with some difficulty (and how he _marveled_ at that – a force so great as to paralyse him!) and examine him more closely. The boy’s pulse was racing, but beginning to slow down, and his face gleamed with a sheen of cold sweat. Energy was still flowing off him, but in the form of a fine grey mist that smelled like fresh snow. Intuitively, Marvolo recognized that the change was over.

He sat back down, and waited for Hadrian to wake up from the trancelike state of his transformation.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Minor formatting, grammatical and quality edits - 2018.12.30)  
> I made up "Chardrey" and "Old Ammett" for locations, as they sound vaguely British enough to be real. "Chardrey" comes from _charnel_ , as in, 'associated with death', because of course it does. In retrospect, Ammett sounds similar to Emmett, as in Emmett Till (may he rest in peace), but my notes say Ammett came from _amity_ , 'a friendly relationship'. I don't think I intended for this to happen, but "Chardrey Hill, Old Ammett" essentially comes out to "a friendly relationship with death".
> 
> ...maybe I _should_ have been an English major, at this rate. I'm already reading too much into things. xD 
> 
> ~ 2018.12.30


	4. Prelude to Eden

When Harry came back to himself, it was early evening. He blinked a few times, disoriented; then, looked up to find a fire burning in the hearth, and Marvolo still sitting opposite him, a familiar heavy glass in hand. The older wizard did not speak just yet; he merely gestured to the table beside Harry’s chair, where there rested a matching glass. Harry reached a shaky hand out to bring it to his lips, suddenly very aware that his throat was raw. For a few minutes, he let the curious mix of healing potion and spiced liquor tickle this throat, mindful of the Dark Lord’s eyes on him, and stared instead into the flames.

When the silence had stretched long enough, he coughed to clear his throat. “What _was_ that?”

Marvolo seemed…pleased, at the question. “Wild magic,” he answered, summoning a book off the shelf overhead. It was bound in the same cream-colored leather as the one Harry remembered reading earlier, and floated in front of the older wizard while he opened to a bookmarked page. Harry was surprised to see him take out his wand – something Marvolo had hardly done at all so far in their time together – to run the tip down the page, murmuring a spell under his breath. Blue symbols and letters flowed off the page and into the air, held over the coffee table as if suspended on thread, spinning slowly like a mobile or a model solar system. Harry squinted at the lines of runes; he didn’t recognize a single one, not that he expected to, but he was intensely curious as to what they could be.

He hadn’t realized he was leaning forward in his seat until they suddenly shifted and flowed into new shapes – then Harry was leaning back against his chair to better see the three interlocked globes that pulsed with multicolored light.

Marvolo leaned back in his own chair, apparently finished setting up the globes. “One of the central tenets of magical theory,” the older wizard explained, “is that the ‘soul’ is formed from three key aspects. From most to least understood, they are: the _Physical_ ,” here the lower-left sphere turned green, “the _Mental_ ,” beside it, the lower-right sphere glowed blue, “and the _Magical_ ,” the top sphere pulsed with an eerily bright purple light, “and the interaction of these aspects is what gives shape and texture to the individual soul.” A faint collection of white runes emerged from the area where the three spheres met, taking the shape of an equilateral triangle around them.

“I haven’t yet begun to teach you the details of magical theory that I intend to, but perhaps the most important concept to understand, and the easiest to see from this visual aid, is that these aspects _must_ remain in balance; their relative strength must be roughly equal in order for the soul to survive.” The spheres grew and shrank and approximate unison, and the triangle grew and shrank with them, wobbling a bit as it moved. “If the Physical – the body – is damaged in battle, for example, the wizard can will his magic to heal him, if he has enough willpower, even if he doesn’t quite know the spells. Likewise, an able-bodied, magically powerful wizard is especially resistant to mind magics like the Imperius Curse; but a weaker individual will crumple under the Cruciatus and go insane.” Harry shuddered, thinking of the Longbottoms.

Marvolo paused for a moment, seeming to consider his next words. “The curses known as Unforgivables will be relevant in a moment, as they often are in magical theory – but I digress.” The interlocked spheres began to shrink, till they would have fit in Harry’s palm. “This is a good approximation of a wizard’s soul at birth.” Harry stared at it, much surprised by just how tiny it was. “The body, mind and magical core are still developing at this stage of life.” The spheres swelled to about double their previous size, the triangle glowing a golden yellow, before he continued. “At age one, this would be typical – still developing, certainly, but much larger than before, and set to continue growing in this pattern until the witch or wizard begins actively practicing magic, around age ten or eleven. However…”

He drew a dark red lightning bolt over the circles with his wand, and their shapes began to distort. There was a hard edge to the older wizard’s tone when he continued; Harry paid close attention. “The Killing Curse functions to separate the three aspects of the soul entirely in whatever living target it hits; for this reason, perhaps, it works equally well on all things with souls, be they Puffskeins or dragons. Exactly _how_ the separation is done is largely unknown – only that it _does_. Several centuries of study, including a decade of my own research, indicates that the curse actually borrows a very small piece of each Aspect from the caster, converts it into magical energy, and directly attacks the target; when the attack is complete, the energy returns, undiminished, to the caster’s aspects. This energy, and the conversion process, can be harnessed in those moments to power rituals or even transfer the soul into objects – one of many reasons the curse is unlike any other fatal spell yet known.”

Marvolo paused to sip at his drink, and Harry did the same, swallowing nervously. He wondered where Marvolo was going with this – and why the older wizard seemed to be growing almost angry.

“When the curse _fails_ , you see,” said the Dark Lord quietly, “that energy is instead given up to the target; a cosmic reward, if you will.” Harry absently reached up to touch his scar, his attention on the glowing triangle and spheres, of which the purple, Magical, sphere had distorted to triple the size of the other two, and seemed to be slowly deflating like a balloon in the cold.

“The magical core is responsible for funneling this power influx into the other two aspects at a survivable pace; for a one-year-old wizard, that pace is rather slow. After my body was disintegrated due to magical backlash – I believe I called it a state ‘less than the meanest ghost’? – your magical core would have begun to funnel its sudden power surplus to the other two aspects as fast as it could allow. Undisturbed, then, your recovery and rebalancing would have taken about a decade, assuming you didn’t start learning magic at a younger age; you would have arrived at Hogwarts ultimately soul-stable, with a level of intelligence decidedly beyond your peers’, and more magical power at your disposal than might be considered fair.” Marvolo’s lips briefly quirked in a smirk, but then he frowned.

“These things _should_ have happened – but then you were placed with those _Muggles_.” Harry shuddered at the utter, specific contempt in the Dark Lord’s tone. “Those vile…I hesitate to call them _people_ , knowing as I do what they have done.” He took a deep breath, collecting himself. “Remind me to explain magical war crimes to you later, when I’m not _absolutely livid_.

“They actively repressed you from a young age; this caused the imbalance to remain, and over time, to worsen considerably.” Harry watched the spheres deforming into strange, misshapen lumps, growing in fits and starts, and pulsing like a beating heart. The triangle around them didn’t look like a triangle anymore. Was this what his soul had _looked_ like? It was repulsive.

Marvolo had paused again to drink more liquor and restrain what was probably the same anger Harry was beginning to feel. “When a young witch or wizard first begins to learn spells,” he murmured, “their core begins to gather energy at a faster rate, in anticipation of more regular depletion – and for most children this tends to even out the sizes of their aspects, as more energy flows throughout the cycle of their connections. Thus balanced, the soul grows uniformly for the rest of their life.

“However, your unbalanced, subconsciously repressed magical core was not able to distribute energy evenly to the other two aspects, even from the beginning. Instead, it gathered energy, and gathered, and gathered; after a certain point, it couldn’t grow in size any further without damaging the rest of you – so the energy contained within the core, typically fluid in appearance, became nearly _solid_.” The purple not-sphere swelled even more than it already had, filling up with a purple light, in a way that reminded Harry sickeningly of a festering boil or a blistering burn. The green and blue spheres were almost invisible in comparison. “It could have stayed like that, on a knife’s edge of sorts, for a decade at most once it reached that point – we could speculate, but again, I digress.” The Dark Lord drained his glass and set it firmly down on the table. “It is at this point, more or less, that I unwittingly prodded at the bonds restraining your core by bringing up unpleasant memories related to the bonds’ formation. That confrontation, brief as it was, proved nevertheless enough to reach the threshold needed to break them – and the backlash from binding up your core for so long would have levelled the manor entirely, perhaps worse, had I not put shields up as quickly as I did. I will have to show you the memory sometime – it was truly striking.”

How much power, Harry wondered, could have impressed this man? Harry almost asked, but then thought of a more pressing question. “If that’s what it looked like then, what does it look like now?”

Marvolo’s lips twitched again in the expression Harry was beginning to read as _I’m glad you asked._ With a brilliant flash of light, the entire area contained within the distorted white line turned purple, until the line dissolved away entirely, and the color faded to reveal a _very_ large purple sphere, and two comparatively tiny blue and green ones below it. As Harry watched, the purple sphere rotated very slowly, while below it, the smaller two were a blur of motion, growing quickly as they whirled about like gears on the Hogwarts Express. “Your core is now finally able to balance itself out,” the older wizard said, sounding relieved. “Where the original imbalance would have taken a decade to correct, this one has a lot more energy to work with; the process is still not immediate, but it most likely will be finished by the end of the summer. We’ll be moving things along by working with all sorts of magic, especially the sort that demands pure energy – the expenditure will hopefully ease any tension you begin to feel in the next day or so.” Now that he mentioned it, Harry did feel a bit wound-up. In the back of his mind, he wondered how that odd listless feeling from the morning might connect into everything.

They watched the spinning spheres a while longer, before Marvolo closed the book and the visuals dissolved into a cloud of colorful dust before disappearing. “I realize this is a lot of information to take in at once – what do you think so far, Hadrian?”

“I…” Harry gave it some thought. “I think that kind of explanation wouldn’t have made sense a few hours ago, but it does now. Does that mean anything?”

The older wizard nodded, pleased. “It sounds like the improvements are already beginning. You’ll notice physical changes overnight, if my notes are any indication; already, your magical signature has changed dramatically enough to dispel the Trace and any other spells someone might have keyed to your signature or person. We’ll be entirely undetectable tomorrow when we go out to celebrate.”

“…Celebrate?”

Marvolo _grinned_ , then – an expression Harry hadn’t yet seen on his face – and stood from the chair with a flourish of robes. “Of course! This is an incredible feat of magic, and a major milestone, the kind worth commemorating. But first, I don’t think I can pretend not to be utterly exhausted a minute longer – and I’m frankly curious to see what happens overnight. Are you?”

He was, Harry realized – _he was_! Suddenly giddy, Harry grinned back; he followed Marvolo up the stairs, feeling light on his feet right up until he collapsed on his bed. He hadn’t noticed it sitting in the chair, but he was sore all over, and while power seemed to be thrumming in his veins, urging him to move around, his limbs were as heavy as lead once he lay down on the ridiculously comfortable bed. (It was even nicer than his bed at Hogwarts; how was that possible?)

Nagini, who had been absent earlier, slithered into the bed with him moments before he closed his eyes; her now-familiar presence eased the young wizard into a deep sleep, and his dreams were filled with more color and light than Harry ever remembered seeing. Distantly, he was aware of a tickling feeling spreading outward from his chest, like a gentler Skele-Gro.

On the brink of a deeper sleep, Harry mused that in some ways, Marvolo was a lot like he’d always imagined Sirius would have been. _Minus Azkaban, that is._ _  
_

Nagini could sense much changing in boy-wizard-Hadrian while he slept beside her. She watched him with the same detached fascination she’d had when seeing birds hatching; in fact, the sounds were much the same, too. He gave off such _wonderful_ heat in the process that she found herself almost lulled to sleep; but dark-lord-king-Marvolo had asked her to watch Hadrian carefully, as he was too tired to do so, so she remained awake as the boy grew and grew, and sang to him the legends of the serpents to pass the time.

She was three-quarters the way through the Myth of the Basilisk when dawn broke, and nine-tenths done when Hadrian finally woke, though he listened to the end without stirring. It was when he bade her good-morning, and opened his eyes, that she noticed a most interesting transformation.

 

Nagini’s shriek of delight upstairs jerked Marvolo out of his thoughts at the breakfast table; she rushed down the stairs to herald the younger wizard’s awakening, hissing too quickly in her excitement for him to be able to understand her.

The old necromancer hadn’t expected the boy to wake this early; he’d been breakfasting alone, anticipating something to happen in an hour or two, but that plan was thrown aside the moment Hadrian stepped into view in the doorframe. How exactly is one supposed to react to meeting their doppelgänger face-to-face? “Good morning, Marvolo,” said the boy – _in Marvolo’s own voice, nonetheless_ – with a sheepish grin that somehow managed to fit well on his face. “Do you suppose I could borrow these robes Nagini picked out? None of mine fit anymore. Unless there’s a permanent resizing charm?”

The Dark Lord still had _some_ dignity to uphold in private – he refused to stutter, no matter how much he was surprised. “There _is_ such a thing as a permanent resizing charm,” he allowed, “but you may as well keep those for now.” Hadrian sat down a bit shakily in the chair opposite his own; Sigurd popped in a moment after to bring a plate.

 

Harry was still reeling a bit from the aftermath of his transformation, but he didn’t let that restrain his enthusiasm as Marvolo conjured – yes, _conjured_ , and he would be teaching Harry that trick later – breakfast. Harry had a small heap of scrambled eggs, crispy sliced ham, and fried green beans, which turned out to be more delicious than he’d ever have expected. (Not that the Dursleys would ever have wanted to try it, the great lumps.)

The minute they were done eating, Marvolo led Harry to the main hall. “Where are we going?” the younger wizard asked.

“That’s the best part,” Marvolo laughed, as Elath appeared with a pair of heather gray summer cloaks and what looked like a small treasure chest. He tossed Harry a cloak – it was cool to the touch, and stayed comfortable when he put it on (was it enchanted, or a special material, or both?) – and opened the box to reveal a pair of curved metal rods. “We can go _anywhere_ and _everywhere_ , Hadrian. It’s your party, after all.” He gave Harry one rod and took the other, placing it behind his ear. Harry watched it disappear under the man’s fingers, immensely curious as to how that could possibly happen, before doing the same; the metal was warm to the touch, and with a tickle, it seemed to fade into nonbeing the moment it was set.

‘ _Ta-dah,’_ laughed Marvolo’s voice in his head. ‘ _Temporary telepathic link artifact – would you believe these existed a century before Muggle telephones, and they still haven’t tried to improve them to work in more than just pairs?’_ He explained how the artifact worked almost in an afterthought; it occurred to Harry that he was already getting caught up in the older wizard’s pace, and that the friendly sort of banter was something he _liked_.

There was just so much Harry wanted to ask, already, but he knew if he didn’t keep his mouth shut a bit longer, they’d never leave.

‘ _So, where to?_ ’ The older wizard offered Harry his arm. ‘ _Your pick._ ’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I considered making this chapter longer, but it's par for the course in my current style. I don't think I can handle the 10k-word masterpieces of chapters that some people do, just yet.
> 
> Feel free to check out my tumblr by the way -- https://annabelle-hopkins.tumblr.com/ -- I don't yet know how to format links in here, but I'll figure it out by next post. ♥
> 
> (Minor formatting and quality edits, 2018.12.30)


	5. Eden, Part One.

Secluded in his office, Albus Dumbledore watched his silver instruments attempt, for the eighth time, to recalibrate themselves to young Harry’s magical signature, clenched fists shaking in frustration. Twelve hours ago, he had been jarred out of sleep by the high-pitched shriek that meant they’d lost their target --  _ every last one _ . Now, the Headmaster was beginning to grow pessimistic about his chances in getting the tracking charms to take again. He leaned back in his chair, tossing back mouthfuls of the Firewhiskey he normally used for a nightcap, and puzzled over the situation, barely restraining his annoyance from spilling over into anger.

When the instruments had first started going off, Dumbledore had thought himself only mildly inconvenienced: the boy’s signature had shifted rather often for a young wizard, something he’d always attributed to the curse scar, and every year or so a few of the tracking and monitoring artifacts came to be in need of an adjustment. It took two, three attempts at most to recalibrate them all, a process normally aided by bits of hair gathered from the boy during his visits to the hospital wing; then he would have no further issues for the next year or two. Any academic worth his salt knows such a solution for tracking magicals is not long-term -- a fact proven time and time again over the years, including many stubborn attempts on Tom Riddle, in bygone days. That said, according to all the research Dumbledore had pored over in his decades of life, changes in magical signature, regardless of an individual’s power or bloodline, were supposed to be  _ gradual _ , and this recent shift was not.

Worse, he mused, the enchantments were now failing to lock onto  _ anyone _ by the name of Harry James Potter.  _ At least the blood-based detector proves he is still alive. _ But the moment he thought of that, the spinning bauble in question -- which had never needed alteration in fifteen years -- began to slow in its rotations, going still at the same time the silver instruments chimed sadly to tell him of another failed calibration.

“ _ Himmel, Arsch, und Zwirn! _ ” Dumbledore forwent the glass and drained the last of the Firewhiskey straight from the bottle, slamming it down on his desk so hard the bottom of the bottle cracked. This was hopeless. He sank into his chair and put his head in his hands with a sigh. These tracking instruments were no mere trinkets bought in a shop -- he had taken much pride in developing the artifacts himself, enchanting them to see through the most complicated wards yet discovered. Now, somehow, the boy’s blood itself had altered enough to throw off the most reliable of his tracking devices. Barring a very long and complicated ritual, which would exhaust him for the next week and require two other participants that would need to be sworn to secrecy, there was nothing more, magical or Muggle, that could be done to hunt down Harry Potter. When the search parties returned in the evening with empty hands, he would tell the Order: it was time to move on.

War, once started, waits for no one, after all.

 

Harry beamed at the shops lining Diagon Alley with all the enthusiasm of someone who had never seen them before. Which, in a way, he hadn’t -- magical London in the early summer sun looked and felt worlds away from the same place during ‘school supply season’. The streets were still lined with people, sure, but this afternoon, most of them were adults, and nearly all of them obviously tourists. No wonder Marvolo had disguised them both as foreigners on the way here -- a pair of German wizards (speaking  _ in _ German, no less, thanks to a spell of the man’s own invention) were nondescript compared with the flashy, glamorous robes of the Indian family gathered around the display window at Quality Quidditch Supplies,  or the brightly-garbed vendors selling rows of imported jewels in stalls between the storefronts. Harry ran his fingers through his straight blond hair -- golden blond, not Malfoy platinum -- for the fifth time in as many minutes, and wondered aloud if they shouldn’t start at Gringotts before doing any real exploring.

“You’re right, brother,” agreed Marvolo (currently ‘Marius’ to Harry’s ‘Adrian’), standing on his tiptoes to look over the heads of the crowd. He was playing the ‘older brother’ in their disguises, with shorter, curlier hair the same color as Harry’s. They merged with the foot traffic in the direction of the tall marble building looming over the Alley, and were shortly ascending the stone steps to the main entrance. Harry, with his now-perfect vision, realized that the trim around the doors was not plain metal -- rather, a fanciful patterned border was sculpted into the bronze.

At the top of the steps, Marvolo pulled Harry aside and surprised him yet again by addressing the goblin door guards in their own guttural tongue. ‘ _ Announcing ourselves before we go in guarantees both the goblins’ discretion and our own personal safety, _ ’ he explained over the link. ‘ _ Gringotts does not appreciate thieves, but will look fondly upon high-profile clientele who provide notice of their disguises.’ _

‘ _ Keeps order in the public queue,’ _ Harry mused, keeping his expression carefully blank. After a short conversation where, thankfully, only Marvolo did any talking for the two of them, the guards nodded at the wizards and stepped back to their posts on either side of the great stone entryway. ‘ _ Follow me, _ ’ the Dark Lord said as he led the way to the teller’s counter furthest from the door.

What followed was perhaps the shortest visit to the bank Harry had ever experienced, tossing many of Harry’s preconceptions about Gringotts out the proverbial window. The goblins didn’t even bring them down to their vaults -- a pair of enchanted coin-purses, filled with more Galleons than Harry expected he’d ever manage to spend, materialized at the teller’s desk shortly after they presented their vault keys (or in Harry’s case, three drops of blood, which conveniently summoned his key for him from wherever it had been and printed his account balance on a slip of parchment). They were sent on their way with a remarkably polite farewell from the goblin teller, not ten minutes after they’d arrived.

In retrospect, he supposed announcing themselves had been a large part of it: Marvolo had made the goblins very aware of just  _ who _ was at their door. When he mentioned as much to the older wizard, the Dark Lord cracked up, throwing an arm over Harry’s shoulder. “That’s what I said to the guards,” he wheezed, eyes watering. “ ‘I think  _ you know who _ I am!’”

 

Necessity drew them over to Madam Malkin’s next, with the intention of getting some robes tailored for Harry off the rack -- he was still wearing Marvolo’s robes, albeit Transfigured for their disguises -- but the shop was having some kind of sale, leaving it overrun with witches, so they went a few doors down to Twilfitt and Tattings instead. Its smaller street presence made it much quieter, and having a higher-income client base meant the shop could afford to specialize in enchanted fabrics; Harry decided, after just one short fitting session, that he preferred the place by far over Malkin’s shop. Only about half an hour in total was needed to switch his borrowed robes, stiff from magical resizing, with an elegant set of black ‘casual’ robes that kept cool against his skin despite the summer sun -- and despite being much more fitted than Harry was used to wearing.

On their way out, having arranged for an entire wardrobe to be picked up by Elath over the course of the week, Marvolo looked through the glamours to inform Harry, with obvious amusement, that they no longer looked quite as identical as they had before. ‘ _ We might still be mistaken for cousins, but then, this  _ is _ Britain, so… _ ’ Harry thought of the Black family tapestry and repressed a giggle.

“So, what now?” he asked. Marvolo shrugged. “Now that the most pressing of our concerns is taken care of, we can visit wherever you like,” he offered. Over the link, he added, ‘ _ We have a few hours until Knockturn Alley really comes to life, and the place I was thinking of for our celebration isn’t open until nightfall. This part of the party is yours.’ _

Harry promptly dragged him through all his favourite shops from previous visits, and a few of the merchant tents besides. The Dark Lord seemed distinctly out of place, even in a disguise as thorough as his and Harry’s were, browsing shelves in Quality Quidditch Supplies (where Harry got the last broom kit for the Firebolt and picked up a catalog of broom-makers from around the world). The effect was amplified tenfold during their visit to Fortescue’s: no wizard could have kept from giggling at the absurdity of Voldemort enjoying  _ chocolate swirl with raspberry sauce _ .

Not that they didn’t make interesting purchases in between the silliness; Harry had originally planned to skip past Flourish & Blotts, given the enormity of the Manor library, but seeing how quiet it was inside had encouraged him to in anyway. So it was that Harry was introduced to the wonders of the rare-book section, a part of the store he’d previously ignored: and between the two of them, the bookshop yielded half a dozen manuscripts off the Dark Lord’s mental checklist, including one elusive volume disguised as a Swiss Herbology text, which Harry snagged for only sixteen Sickles, and a handy copy of  _ Moste Potente Potions _ from the adjacent section entitled ‘Less-Rare Books’ which would make a great ironic present for Hermione’s birthday.

Was it...unfair of him, Harry wondered, to be favoring his new friend (of a sort) over his old ones? Harry dismissed that train of thought for the moment as he and Marvolo approached the exotic imports stands closer to Knockturn Alley in late afternoon. One tent in particular had caught his eye when they’d passed by Slug & Jiggers earlier in the day: arranged something like an apothecary itself, the tent was filled with sparkling minerals and powders instead of various animal and plant parts. ‘ _ What exactly is this tent selling?’ _ he asked Marvolo, who was eyeing one large crystal with interest, and received a brief lesson in alchemy by way of an answer.

“Here, look at this shelf of powders,” the Dark Lord gestured at the long row of bowls. “These are actually separated by their alchemical element -- note how the dull powders on the left are furthest separated from their similarly-colored, shinier counterparts on the right. The duller powders are all water-element compounds; their structures are compromised by the air, water’s secondary elemental opponent. When dissolved in water and dried out, they gather together more coarsely, becoming a sand, instead -- and so on, increasing in size with each purification, until you get these purified forms as larger mineral crystals, like the remarkably large energetic-water crystal that drew my attention in the first place.” Likewise, the shining powders and sparklier crystals were fire elemental, and would “grow” into crystals with repeated melting and cooling.

‘ _ In fact, I’m going to get these for us to use later. Just a moment.’ _ To the merchant’s shock and delight, Marvolo bought out the entire shop, spending well over three thousand Galleons. While they waited for everything to be boxed up -- Sigurd would bring the merchandise back to the Manor, as magically shrinking things could set off an explosion -- Marvolo encouraged Harry to reach out with his magic for a crystal that felt ‘right’, in order to find the elements that worked with him the best. It seemed a rather vague direction until Harry actually tried it, closing his eyes and visualizing a circle spreading out from his upturned palm; almost immediately, he felt some kind of ‘pull’ in the direction of the larger crystals arranged on a shelf furthest from the tent’s entrance.

When he opened his eyes, Harry was staring into a transparent crystal that looked like its jagged edges had been smoothed down. ‘ _ Very nice, _ ’ came praise from the other side of the room. ‘ _ The esoteric elements -- energy and darkness, also known as entropy and the void, or even “noise” and “silence” -- favor you in equal measure. Perhaps you have an untapped aptitude for alchemy; I wasn’t drawn to any element in particular when I first learned the art.’ _

Harry picked up the crystal; it was the size of his palm, but seemed to weigh almost nothing. ‘ _ Who taught you alchemy? The only person I know of is Nicholas Flamel. _ ’ Speaking of Flamel, was he still alive? Harry couldn’t imagine lending the source of the Elixir of Life without a backup supply of Elixir -- or maybe, even better, the man had had more than one Philosopher’s Stone.

‘ _ A great alchemist, _ ’ Marvolo answered without answering. ‘ _ Perhaps I’ll take you to meet him sometime.’ _ The merchant had nearly finished packing up everything by this point; Marvolo called for Sigurd with a soft word, and the unnaturally tall elf began to bring things away. ‘ _ Tomorrow or the next day, for certain, I’ll give you a more thorough introduction to alchemy as an Art. It is one area of esoteric magic best learned by experience, as are ritual magics and many of the more complicated areas of Potions.’ _

Harry was about to demur, to say he didn’t want to take up too much of Marvolo’s time, when he realized that was actually a lie -- and conveyed as much to the older wizard, somewhat surprised at himself. ‘ _ Is it selfish to just...take you up on that offer? I’m finding the idea of learning fascinating, all of a sudden.’ _

This drew a genuine smile out of the Dark Lord’s cheery but inauthentic face. ‘ _ Quite the contrary -- you’ll find that we have more than enough time to go around. I meant what I said about you being half-legendary by September; knowledge and power are the two things I have the most to give.’ _

Later, Harry resolved, he would find out why: why Marvolo was so willing to help him, even from the beginning. To some extent, he couldn’t help but  _ disbelieve _ \-- but he couldn’t find it in him to distrust the Dark Lord’s professed motives, now.

  
  


The sun was most-of-the-way set by the time they turned their attentions to Knockturn Alley. After seeing Marvolo buy out one tent, the purveyors nearby had been more than happy to show him and Harry their best wares. The pockets of their grey cloaks were brimming with wrapped and shrunken items -- and yet their wallets were barely depleted, compared to the ridiculous amount they had on hand. (Frankly, after seeing his vault balance, Harry didn’t think it possible to overspend.) Now, before they crossed into the less-reputable alley, the older wizard led Harry into a gap between buildings so they could adjust their glamours.

Harry had wondered for quite some time in the past few years whether the Dark Lord went out much, given how instantly recognizable he was in battle. Now, knowing that the Voldemort face was a disguise, and listening to Marvolo mutter long incantations under his breath to alter their appearances in a thousand subtle and overt ways, it was obvious that the wizard could -- and did -- go wherever he pleased. He resisted the urge to scratch at the slightly itchy skin on his cheeks and the backs of his hands while some new Transfiguration was applied to them; instead, he considered the idea of Marvolo taking a stroll down Diagon Alley, charming people’s hats blue and wreaking mischief in the shape of a child, and struggled not to laugh out loud at the very concept. ‘ _ Imagine in people knew you could disguise as anything and anyone with this much ease,’ _ Harry mused over the link. ‘ _ People would turn on each other in a heartbeat whenever anyone did anything remotely out-of-character.’ _

‘ _ It would be a horrorshow for the Ministry, _ ’ Marvolo agreed, spelling his eyes a dark blue and returning his hair to its natural colour, albeit longer. ‘ _ You and I, of all people, know the danger of idiots in great numbers.’ _ He conjured a hand mirror and turned it so Harry could see. ‘ _ Do you want your hair longer, or shall I leave it as-is? _ ’

Harry nearly jumped at the new face that looked back at him. He looked twice as old as he was -- and nothing like the German wizard from before. ‘ _ Wow. _ ’ With black hair longer than Sirius’, blue eyes, and faded blue triangles of runes tattooed on his face and hands (that must have been the itching), he looked every part the Russian warlock disguise that the Dark Lord had suggested they use for the latter half of their day.

‘ _ If you speak now, _ ’ Marvolo murmured, braiding a lock of his hair with a spell, ‘ _ if will be in Russian, or English with a heavy accent, just as with the German version earlier. Warlocks from the old Soviet bloc are more common on the Continent than in Britain; in the black markets, we will be unremarkable, and on the streets, vaguely intimidating. Overall? We will be forgotten quickly by observers, without the need for spells that would draw closer scrutiny.’ _

Even better, the man added as they headed out from the alcove with their hoods up, warlocks of their assumed sect typically didn’t speak aloud, relying on telepathy between each other and speaking only to outsiders.

Just then, leaving the small alleyway, Harry felt the sudden urge to look to his left; he glanced over through the fabric of his hood -- charmed, ever so conveniently, to be transparent to the wearer -- and nearly fell over in shock. ‘ _ Marvolo!’ _ he hissed, a bit panicked, ‘ _ two Order members are on the corner! One of them -- Moody -- can see through walls with his magical eye. _ ’ And, he remembered, his Invisibility Cloak. Mad-Eye and Kingsley Shacklebolt were scanning the crowd from a vantage point across the street, and any moment they would notice Harry and Marvolo -- so Harry believed.

‘ _ Well spotted, Hadrian, _ ’ came a much calmer reply after a moment. ‘ _ Their Notice-Me-Not charm must be wearing off -- case in point of why such wards and spells are too attention-getting for surveillance, given how quickly we’ve just discovered them. Worry not, though: for all it can see through walls and objects, that enchanted eye cannot see through the glamours I have applied. Pretend as though you noticed nothing, and unremarkable we shall remain.’ _ They kept walking, at the same easy pace as before; though Harry nervously looked back twice, seeing how the eye didn’t look their way after all.

Up ahead, the Dark Lord stopped before a blank wall and murmured something into a hole between two bricks. Grabbing hold of Harry’s wrist, he pulled him straight through the wall and into what looked a bit like a nicer version of the Hog’s Head. Harry took a moment to get his bearings before looking to Marvolo for an explanation.  
  


‘ _ Welcome to the Partridge and Pheasant -- second home of all Knockturn residents and regular visitors, and the best-maintained underground Floo nexus in Europe.’ _ Marvolo could see the curiosity growing on Hadrian’s altered face. ‘ _ You didn’t think the Ministry controlled the  _ entire _ Floo system, did you? _ ’ He smirked, and let the younger wizard mull it over while they passed through the tavern part of the building and headed for the stairs, to the place Marvolo was really here to show him. Ah, excellent -- Maeve was tending bar this evening. “Blessed Mae, so good to see you,” he called out to the busty barmaid. She knew several of his aliases at this point, but not that they were the same person.

The witch blinked, ‘recognizing’ him by the address, and offered a bright smile that showed off her silver-tipped tooth when she handed off a large bottle of top-shelf Firewhiskey. A small bit of parchment wrapped around the top had Dolohov’s intelligence report on Azkaban written in cipher; Marvolo set that in a separate pocket of his sleeve for now, and passed the bottle on to Hadrian with a tap of his wand to pop the cork. ‘ _ Give that a try -- proper Firewhiskey is barely alcoholic. You could drink the whole bottle and barely get buzzed.’ _ Hadrian, clearly heartened by the news, took a large gulp, and his eyes went wide; ah, Marvolo had thought the boy had tried the stuff before. He’d neglected to mention the ‘fire’ part of Firewhiskey. To his credit, Hadrian didn’t spit any out, only scanned the label and tried some more.

Up the stairs and through two doors they went, toward the reason they’d stopped at the Partridge and Pheasant in the first place. ‘ _ Perchance, have you heard of Fortuna, Hadrian?’ _ Unlike with the liquor, Marvolo wasn’t surprised that the boy hadn’t: even better to learn it now, in a proper Fortuna Hall like the one they were entering. ‘ _ Follow me to the primary seats, then, and I’ll show you the way it’s played. After the first few rounds, you can join in as you please.’ _  
  


Harry was still feeling the lingering heat of the Firewhiskey (and what a drink that was! No wonder Sirius had favored it) when Marvolo ushered him into the back room of the Partridge and Pheasant. At least, it had  _ seemed _ like the back room. In Harry’s reformed opinion, blinking up at the high ceiling, the inn below was more of a  _ front _ . He was...somewhat...awestruck at the beauty of the long hall, with its frescoes of cherubim running through fields of flowers across the white stone walls, and the long table that seemed to sag under the weight of a great pile of gold and jewels; if not for Marvolo’s guiding hand, he might have stood there, utterly lost, for a good twenty minutes.

‘ _ Don’t worry much about the details,’ _ Marvolo murmured, ‘ _ the best Fortuna halls are thrice as opulent as this one.’ _ He pried the Firewhiskey bottle from Harry’s limp grip, setting it on a table between two of the twenty or so throne-like chairs arranged around the table. ‘ _ Have a seat, hm?’ _

While they waited for more people to fill in the five remaining primary seats -- apparently that was needed before the game could begin -- Marvolo and Harry took turns drinking from the Firewhiskey bottle, with Harry politely avoiding drinking from the same side as the Dark Lord when it was his turn. ‘ _ Every player starts with no idea of how the game works, _ ’ Marvolo explained, before tossing a handful of Galleons onto the table. Harry followed his lead, to the older wizard’s approving nod. ‘ _ The tradition of ignorance has been around almost as long as the game itself -- the Romans invented Fortuna, so they say, and the Egyptians perfected it.’ _

‘ _ Wouldn’t the Egyptians have existed earlier than the Romans?’ _ A group of goblins was approaching the last seats; Harry noticed other players trickling in through the doors at the other end of the hall to fill a second row of chairs behind the first.

‘ _ You’re thinking of the Muggle civilizations -- for various reasons, the Egyptian magicals remained isolated until just before the Roman Empire, which mixed Muggle and magical people freely, began to trade with them. The Roman wizards who invented Fortuna brought it to Egypt as a new form of entertainment for the goblin overseers of the major trading cities along the Nile, in the hopes of keeping them distracted.’ _

‘ _ It’s some form of gambling, then, I guess?’ _ Harry took another sip of the Firewhiskey, focusing on the game that was just beginning. Several rounds in -- each round only lasted about a minute by his reckoning -- he’d come to understand that yes, Fortuna  _ was _ a sort of gambling game, but not in the way the upper-year Gryffindors’ poker tables were. One player, chosen at the beginning, would go around the table with a gold platter and collect bets from the primary-seated players who wanted to bet that round. Then, a chime would sound, and portions of the pooled bets -- as well as some treasure from the table -- would fly over to the winners of the round. How exactly the winners and losers were determined was beyond Harry; when he admitted as much, Marvolo laughed, telling him that was the beauty of the game.

‘ _ As you might expect, the goblins took to it like fish to water; the merchants who brought Fortuna to Egypt enjoyed several years of success during the height of the central African gold rush. A group of especially lucky goblins built up enough wealth to strike out on their own in Rome, and then in Britain, founding the institution that is Gringotts Bank today.’ _ Marvolo placed down a slightly larger bet, and lost it, then bet the same amount and won it all back. ‘ _ Fortuna has the power to make kings -- and to break them; as such, it has been banned and unbanned at Hogwarts since the school’s founding. In fact, for all that Phineas Nigellus Black was Hogwarts’ least-liked Headmaster, he was only asked to step down when he stopped playing at Slytherin House’s Fortuna table.’ _

‘ _ Really? That sour old portrait?’ _ Harry couldn’t really imagine the nasty painted wizard playing the game. But then, he only really knew history  _ of _ Hogwarts Castle, and not much about history  _ within _ it. ‘ _...Is Slytherin House’s table as full of gold as this one?’ _

‘ _ It should be.’ _ Marvolo twirled a platinum bangle around his finger before betting it again the next round. ‘ _ They banned the game in Hogwarts my sixth year, naturally, when Dumbledore became headmaster --’ _

When Harry finally began to play, he found himself winning, and winning big, almost from his first round. He had only ever seen gambling done on Muggle television poker tournaments, or in Quidditch betting at Hogwarts, so he’d initially kept his bets to small amounts with the idea that it was better to lose a little than a lot. Every successive win, however, made him more confident, more giddy -- and he seemed to be winning more and more of the prize pool each time, too. Beside him, Marvolo was grinning at the pile of gold they’d gathered between them, and taking a swig of Firewhiskey every time either of them won. ‘ _ What do you think, ah?’ _ he laughed. ‘ _ Fortuna is one of the best things ever done with magic.’ _

What felt like an hour after Harry’s win streak began, it ended with three small losses in a row; Marvolo put a hand on his shoulder and suggested they go out and spend their winnings. ‘ _ The night is young, my friend -- and we can always come back. Knowing when to leave off is the most important skill to master.’ _ Once they stood up, other players began to leave the primary seats as well, coins jingling loudly as they did; spectators from the second row moved to fill the empty spots, and another game was shortly underway. Harry put his winnings into the Gringotts coin purse, save for a gaudy gold ring that he’d won from the prize pool; on Marvolo’s suggestion, he put it on his right index finger, where it fit best, and left a few coins from his purse on the table toward future games. The Dark Lord had won an actual  _ crown _ sometime during the latter half of the game, when Harry was too engrossed in his own victories to notice; he returned it to the prize pool as well, murmuring something about ‘seeing enough fools have it stolen off them only to find it here the next week’. 

  
  


Harry stifled a laugh as he followed Marvolo back out of the hall and through a door that opened onto a different part of Knockturn than where they’d come in. This side of the infamous alley was much different from what he recalled in his second-year misadventures; it was somewhat more serious, perhaps, quieter, and distinctly dark -- dimly-lit, that is. ‘ _ If we head that way,’ _ Marvolo nodded in the direction of a distant window lit only by a red candle, ‘ _ the path leads into a residential area occupied by vampires, werewolves, and the like; they call it the Old City.’ _ Something passed by the candlelight as Harry watched; it looked somewhat like antlers. ‘ _ The night-markets are the other way.’ _

Knockturn’s high-street in the night was even busier than Diagon in the day, and twice as crowded from the countless shops, stalls, tents, and -- sometimes -- tarps that occupied nearly half the road space. Harry was mildly surprised to learn Borgin & Burkes was  _ closed _ at night; perhaps it couldn’t compete with the variety and prices of the night-market. Marvolo seemed to know a lot of the shopkeepers here, so he stayed close behind the older wizard as they made their way through the crowds, letting himself be introduced to the best places and traders. A thin red door stuck between buildings opened onto a ‘fluids dealership’ that traded in blood, venom, bile and more -- Harry recognized a few bottles from the collection that had been at Grimmauld place last year, and seeing the prices, regretted throwing them out so frivolously. While the Dark Lord engaged in negotiations over the dozens of little vials he’d set on the counter, which Harry supposed were blood, the younger wizard perused the morbidly fascinating ‘fluids of decay’ on the far shelves. Scented embalming fluid, sold in huge jars, made sense for wizarding undertakers (if such a thing existed), but what purpose could ‘concentrated carrion oil’ serve?

‘ _ Attracts buzzards and Thestrals, _ ’ Marvolo answered absently when he asked. Harry considered getting the oil, but decided the Hogwarts thestrals had liked him well enough without it, and eventually opted to buy a tiny vial of concentrated perfume that hung on a chain and claimed to ‘cover the foulest of smells from polite noses with just one drop’. The diluted sample next to the row of vials smelled oddly familiar, fruity and slightly soapy.

Next door, a shop called Dystyl Phaelanges had whole skeletons in the window -- Marvolo wiggled his fingers at them as they passed, and Harry jumped when they waved back. ‘ _ Scares the shopkeeper,’ _ the older wizard smirked. ‘ _ I charmed them to do it years ago -- old Borgin hired me on as an assistant for a few years after Hogwarts. _ ’ Harry let out a cackle that drew several glances from passersby, at the thought of Marvolo tormenting the poor bone-seller, earning a mirthful glance from the Dark Lord at his outburst.

The alley past Dystyl Phaelanges had been magically expanded into a market of its own, fencing stolen goods, Marvolo noted. Harry was surprised, and then angered, to see silverware and goblets adorned with the Black family crest in one display case -- and less surprised to see Mundungus Fletcher tending the wares at that tent. ‘ _ That bastard’s been stealing from my house!’ _

‘ _ No one is foolish enough to buy an item engraved with a House crest,’ _ Marvolo pointed out evenly. ‘ _ The Head of House can recall missing items with a single spell; unless the House of Black goes completely extinct, there’s a significant chance of losing anything you buy.’ _ Harry supposed that was true enough, but surely there were other things from Grimmauld Place that hadn’t been marked? He stepped closer to browse, well aware of Fletcher’s booze-stinking presence on the opposite side of the table. The thief was clearly trying to intimidate him, but stopped abruptly when Marvolo stepped up beside Harry to look as well.

It was only because of his proximity to Marvolo that Harry heard the Dark Lord’s sharp intake of breath as he sighted a gold locket in the display case; he recognized it as the locket no one could open, in the summer before fifth year. ‘ _ Regulus, that  _ traitor _ ,’  _ spat the older wizard with as much venom as Harry had ever heard from him.

‘ _ Don’t tell me -- that’s  _ your _ locket?’ _  No wonder they’d never been able to open it, if Marvolo owned the thing.

‘ _ Fate is smiling upon us, I suppose, _ ’ Marvolo muttered bitterly. ‘ _ If I’d learned this was missing from its rightful place…’  _ He looked to Fletcher, who was peering at Harry and Marvolo with a somewhat worried expression. “How much is this locket?”

In the ensuing haggling, only Harry noticed Marvolo cast an Imperius Curse at Fletcher under the table, just as he smacked his palm loudly on the wood to cover the thief’s flinch as the curse took hold. Fletcher sighed loudly and agreed to a bargain deal on the locket, then began to close up shop.

‘ _ If they let the likes of Fletcher sell here, the rest of this market isn’t worth our time,’  _ the older wizard muttered as he turned away. Harry followed him further down the cobbled main path, turning onto a narrow side street that felt more in-line with his impression of Knockturn from second year: where Knockturn proper was essentially Diagon with different shops, the buildings here were much older in style, looming over the street closely enough to obscure the sky. Here, much more than there, Harry could feel a thrill up his spine -- had he been here alone, he would be intimidated by the place. ‘ _ Where are we going, Marvolo? _ ’

‘ _ I’d like to visit a black market while we’re in the area,’ _ the man responded. He took a sharp turn into dead-end street; Harry noticed the buildings here had no windows. ‘ _ The importers we saw in Diagon are part of a larger caravan from Southeast Asia, who hold their bazaar a few times a year, including tonight -- making now the best time for me to introduce you to the trade in bodies and parts that will supply your practice materials, before the summer ends.’ _ They stopped at the end of the street. From a pocket in his sleeve, Marvolo drew two long scarves of black silk. ‘ _ Here, stop a moment -- I believe one more change in glamours is best for this part of our adventure.’ _ Harry pulled down his hood and let the older wizard wrap the fabric completely around his head and neck; the material tingled against his skin, turning transparent to his vision in the same way the hood of the travelling cloak did. ‘ _ Funny story behind these scarves. I’ll tell you about it later -- if anyone tries to see past the fabric, we won’t appear to have any hair underneath, and our eyes will be black, with black sclera. If we speak at all, it will sound like a monstrous mimicry of human speech: rasping and painful, grating on the ears.’ _ New glamours tingled over Harry’s palms and up his arms, painting white lacquer on his fingernails and giving him an odd, waxy pallor with a nearly grayish complexion. ‘ _ What is this disguise supposed to be?’ _ he asked. ‘ _ Magical creatures of some sort?’ _

Marvolo was now tying off the end of his own scarf. ‘ _ Not quite, but technically correct. The black market trade in bodies, at least in Britain, serves primarily potioneers, magical experimenters, and cultists. At the moment, we look like the third sort: more specifically, a pair of American cultists. Our patron deity, if you can call it that, is Yog-Sothoth -- the All-in-One, the One-in-All, the Beyond One, the Key in the Gate, the Opener of the Way, the Lurker at the Threshold. Any of those names -- not Yog-Sothoth; there’s superstitions about naming him outright even on this side of the Atlantic.’ _ Marvolo turned to face the brick wall, tracing a symbol in the dust on the stone with a grey, white-nailed finger. _ ‘American occultism is...somewhat more otherworldly than the Continental versions, in my opinion. Anyways -- just as with the warlock, you have a prebuilt excuse not to speak -- and anyone who makes the connection between us and the warlocks will think one is a disguise for the other, and look no further. This way, now -- the Bazaar isn’t guarded by a password like the Partridge and Pheasant…’ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just in time for the end of the year - my continued appreciation to everyone who viewed, commented, kudosed, and bookmarked this fic over the course of my writer's block. Without your encouragements, I don't think I would have posted this chapter until 2019.
> 
> I hesitate to promise the next chapter 'soon', but I do have an idea of where to continue. Comments, critiques and suggestions are welcome!
> 
> Also: I have migrated to Pillowfort for the time being, now that Tumblr has died; find me there as Anna_Hopkins!


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